Megan Abbott

In this impossible-to-put-down "panic attack of a novel,"* a small-town high school becomes the breeding ground for a mysterious illness.

Deenie Nash is a diligent student with a close-knit family; her brother Eli is a hockey star and her father is a popular teacher. But when Deenie's best friend is struck by a terrifying, unexplained seizure in class, the Nashes' seeming stability dissolves into chaos. As rumors of a hazardous outbreak spread through school, and hysteria and contagion swell, a series of tightly held secrets emerges, threatening to unravel friendships, families, and the town's fragile sense of security.

A chilling story about guilt, family secrets, and the lethal power of desire, THE FEVER is "a potboiler in the truest, best sense" and "a great novel, full stop."**

Watching her. She looked so weird. So angry.” Her voice speeding up, like her mother’s did when she got excited. Trying to help him see something. “Like she was mad at me,” she went on. “Even though I knew she wasn’t. But it was like she was. She looked so mad.” “Why would she be mad at you, Deenie?” he said, stopping the car too long at the blinking red, someone honking. “She wasn’t. You had nothing to do with this.” She looked at him, her eyes dark and stricken, like she’d been hit.

out to her from the biology lab that she realized that was where she was supposed to be. For a moment, Deenie just stood in the doorway, the room filled with gaping faces. The penetrating gaze of Brooke Campos, her useless lab partner who never did the write-ups and refused to touch the fetal pig. “Honey, I think you should sit down,” Mrs. Zwada said, her brightly lacquered face softer than Deenie had ever seen it. “You can just sit and listen.” “No,” Deenie said, backing up a little.

and peered out. All he could see was a powder-blue coat with a furred hood, a frill of blond hair nearly white under the porch light. “Who’s there?” Eli asked, squinting into the misted driveway. With a tug, she pulled the hood from her head. Except it wasn’t a girl. It was Lise Daniels’s mom, the neighbors’ floodlight hot across her. “Eli?” she called out, hand visored over her eyes. “Is that Eli?” “It’s me,” he said. He’d seen her at the house dozens of times to pick up Lise, had seen

Keith doing there, both her rambunctious, teeth-flashing, hells-yeah daughters and her Adderall-dealing son long gone to state schools, possibly state prison?). There were the earnest parents, notepads and pens out, clasping copies of news articles printed from the Internet in their shaking hands. And there were the ones wearing vaguely stunned expressions, the same ones who could never quite believe their children were failing chemistry, had scorched their lab partners’ hair while swinging

we put in the ground,” she said. “And in the walls. The lake, the air. And the vaccines we give them. The food, the water, the things we say, the things we do. All of it, straight into their sturdy little bodies. Because even if it isn’t any of these things, it could be. Because all we do from the minute they’re born is put them at risk.” He felt his keys cut into his fingers. “We put them at risk just by having them,” he blurted, not even knowing what he meant. Touched by her words,